Bojana Pejić

is an art historian born 1948 in Belgrade (SFR Yugoslavia) who had studied at the History of Art Dept. at the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University.  From 1977 to 1991 she was curator at the Student Cultural Center of Belgrade University, an institution performing the function of an institute for contemporary art, where she organized many exhibitions of Yugoslav and international contemporary art. Since 1991, she has lived in Berlin as a freelance. In 1995, she organized an international symposium The Body in Communismheld at the Literaturhaus – Berlin (Stipendium von der Senatsverwaltung für Kulturelle Angelegenheiten - Künstlerinnenprogramm, Berlin). In May 2005 she has defended her Ph.D. “The Communist Body – An Archeology of Images: Politics of Representation and Spatialization of Power in the SFR Yugoslavia (1945-1991)” (Unpublished).

Teaching and Lecturing 

In 2003, she held the Rudolf Arnheim guest professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin (history of art). (Summer Semester). She was adviser of the project “De/Construction of Monument “organized by the Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo where she also held seminars at the Academy of Fine Arts dedicated to the “Communist Body.” (2004-2005) She was a Maria Goeppert-Mayer guest professor for International Gender Research at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University in Oldenburg (2006/2007). Guest lecturer at Central European University - CEU (Gender Studies) in Budapest (Winter 2013). Guest lecturer at Bauhaus University in Weimar in the course “Public Art and New Strategies” (2014 till now). She has been taking part in numberless international symposia dealing with the condition of art in post-socialist “Eastern” Europe, many of which have been focusing on feminist reading of contemporary Socialist and post-Socialist art productions. She is currently a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at New Europe College, NEC in Bucharest (Getty Program), 2018 – 2020.

Curating

She was chief curator of the exhibition After the Wall - Art and Culture in post-Communist Europeorganized by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (1999), which was also presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Budapest (2000) and at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2000-2001). She was one of the co-curators of the exhibition Aspects/Positions held in the Museum of Contemporary Art – Foundation Ludwig, Vienna in 1999. Between 2002 and 2004, she was one of international advisers of the Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto (Japan) where she also curated a retrospective of Marina Abramović (2003), which also toured to Morigame (Japan). In 2008 she curated the international exhibition Artist-Citizen, 49. October Salon in Belgrade (Serbia). 

In 2007 she became curator and research leader of the exhibition project Gender Check – Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (from the 1960s till mid-1990s) organized by Erste Foundation in Vienna, which opened in 2009. The exhibition presented gender-based works from 24 post-Socialist countries. The exhibition was held Museum of Modern Art – Ludwig Foundation (MUMOK) in Vienna (2009-2010) and in Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw (2010). 

She co-curated the international exhibition Good Girls_ Memory, Desire,Powerin Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest 2013) and co-curated the international exhibition HERO MOTHER – Contemporary Art by post-Communist Women Rethinking Heroism) (Monumentum, Berlin 1916). 

Art criticism, art history and theory

Pejic started to write on contemporary art in the early 1970s and was one of the editors of theoretical art journal Moment, published in Belgrade (1984 – 1991). She contributed to Artforum (New York), Art Press International (Paris), Neue Bildende Kunst (Berlin), and feminist magazine n.paradoxa (London). She has written extensive essays on Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, Valie Export, Jochen Gerz, Maja Bajević, Milovan Marković,  Ilona Nemeth, Male Leis, in which she has been relying on feminist methodologies. Her articles have been published in art journals and catalogues published in Germany, Austria, Poland, Japan, Greece, Croatia, Luxembourg, Great Britain and elsewhere contributed to the publication. She was the editor of the anthology Gender Check: Art and Theory in Eastern Europe – A Reader (2010). 

Berlin, February 2020